The present invention relates to social networks and more particularly to the call-initiated acquisition of information from social networks.
While the term “social networks” may have only come into widespread use relatively recently, social networks have existed as long as there have been societies. Social networks represent individuals and the relationships among those individuals and are usually thought of in terms of “nodes” and “ties”. At a personal level, “nodes” are occupied by individuals whose relationships with other individuals are defined by the “ties” or links between the nodes. The term “ties” has no particular meaning and can represent almost any relationship between two individuals, including but certainly not limited to common religious belief's, kinship, common hobbies, employment, etc.
Social networks are not limited to individuals and can include institutions and relationships among those institutions. The remainder of this description will be limited to personal social networks although many of the described concepts may be applicable to institutional social networks.
Prior to the advent of global communications networks and the development of reasonably priced technologies (e.g., cellular phones and personal computer systems) that allowed large numbers of people to make use of such global communications networks, most people's social networks were developed through repeated face-to-face contacts and virtually the only “repository” of information about a social network was the human memory of each participant in the network. Consequently, typical social networks were limited in size.
As communications capabilities have grown, personal social networks have also grown in size as an individual has become able to communicate almost as readily with someone half way around the globe as with someone in their local community. While the size of an individual's social network may have grown due to improvements in communications capabilities, an individual can no longer rely on repeated face-to-face contacts to acquire and remember social information about others in that individual's social network. There may never be a face-to-face contact between two individuals and the contacts that are made, presumably digitally or by telephone, may be infrequent, reducing the opportunities for one individual to acquire social information about another individual and to commit it to memory
To meet the needs of persons whose social networks have expanded and “gone digital” through their use of global communication systems, computer-based social networking websites including social information repositories or SIRs have come into being. Different websites focus on different ties between participants, such as prior attendance at a particular college or university or a common interest in a particular hobby or sports team. A common characteristic of the different websites is that the participants themselves provide personal information, typically as part of the process for registering at the website, knowing that the personal information will be made available to other participants at the same website.
Different social networking websites generally operate independently of one another, which has meant that there is no simple way to bridge the gap between repositories to make it easier to access and retrieve personal information from different repositories about the same party.